16 core computer made of ATMegas

Your desktop has two, four, or even eight cores, but when’s the last time you’ve seen a multicore homebrew computer? [Jack] did just that, constructing the DUO Mega, a 16 core computer out of a handful of ATMega microcontrollers.

From [Jack]’s description, there are 15 ‘worker’ cores, each with their own 16MHz crystal and connection to an 8-bit data bus. When the machine is turned on, the single ‘manager’ core – also an ATMega328 – polls all the workers and loads a program written in a custom bytecode onto each core. The cores themselves have access to a shared pool of RAM (32k), a bit of Flash, a VGA out port, and an Ethernet controller attached to the the master core.

Since [Jack]’s DUO Mega computer has multiple cores, it excels at multitasking. In the video below, you can see the computer moving between a calculator app, a weird Tetris-like game, and a notepad app. The 16 cores in the DUO Mega also makes difficult calculations a lot faster; he can generate Mandelbrot patterns faster than any 8-bit microcontroller can alone, and also generates prime numbers at a good click.

This is pretty awesome! What I find so astonishing is how simple the wiring looks! For a 16 core machine i’d expect to see a ratsnest that would equal BMOW (featured here many moons ago – http://hackaday.com/2009/02/27/bmow-a-home-made-cpu/) look uncluttered but this is one of the cleanest DIYbuilds I have ever seen! Props!

As pointed out in another post, this is kind of like doing the Parallax Propeller the hard way (which is still cool, BTW). You can program the Propeller in Spin (native), C (compiler, free), BASIC (compiler, free), Forth (compiler, free); the Propeller makes embedded parallel processing very easy.

It seems like a neat concept, but I don’t really get the multi-tasking. Most of the examples are him toggling back and forth BETWEEN the calculator, the game, and notepad. It seems like most of the examples could have been done with a single uP and a separate VGA adapter. It has potential though.